I. Technical Field
The present disclosure generally relates to financial services and transactions enabled on a mobile phone or device. In particular, the present disclosure relates to systems and methods for facilitating mobile banking and commerce, and for authenticating and sharing data with external, third party services and applications over a network.
II. Background Information
Consumers use mobile devices (such as tablets and smartphones) for a variety of purposes. More recently, consumers have begun to increase their use of mobile devices to access their banking and financial information. On a variety of handheld mobile devices, consumers can download “banking apps.” Consumers can download these “apps” (short for “applications”) from various mobile software distribution platforms, such as from the Apple® iTunes® App Store™ or the Google® Play® Marketplace store. Alternatively, consumers can use web applications delivered over HTTPS, which use either server-side or client-side processing to provide a banking experience within a browser on mobile devices. Typical banking application features include, for example, the ability to view recent transactions and account balances; receive account related alerts; automatically pay bills; transfer funds between accounts; and search for branch and ATM locations.
While these banking applications are becoming more popular with consumers, the market demand is for more extensive and useful banking and financial services, and other customer offerings. A wide array of financial applications can provide value to the mobile device user, regardless of whether the user is a business or a consumer.
However, in the universe of mobile financial services, one of the greatest challenges to achieve is encouraging users to sign up for a new service or application. For example, the sign up process often requires users to download a mobile application, create new credentials, and transfer funds from a financial service account into an account associated with the new service.
What is needed therefore in the field is a straightforward system and method for third party applications or services to be able to automatically access a consumer's banking information, especially when a third party application is provisioned and provided access to a consumer from a common mobile banking platform. At the same time, it would be equally beneficial for a system managing the user's financial information to authenticate a third party application or service prior to the sharing of a user's financial information.